Encyclopedia of

Helen Greiner Biography

1967
•
London, England

Roboticist, president and cofounder of iRobot Corporation

Greiner, Helen.

AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced by permission.

For roboticist Helen Greiner the future is not found in the pages of a
science fiction novel; the future is here and now. As president and
cofounder of the iRobot Corporation, she is responsible for helping to
advance the accessibility of robots, which are mechanical devices that
perform functions automatically or by remote control. Most of
iRobot's inventions have been designed for use in the military or
in industry, but with technology costs decreasing, the company's
consumer robot market is starting to take off. Greiner predicts that
within a few years almost every home in the United States will have a
robot to perform such tasks as housecleaning and babysitting. Her
company's vision, as she told Elizabeth Durant of
Technology Review,
is to "get robots into everyone's hands."

A fan of R2D2

Helen Greiner was born in London, England, in 1967. Her father was
a refugee from Hungary who met his future wife at the University of
London. When she was five years old, the family moved to the United States
where they settled in Southampton, New York, a suburb of New York City.
Even when she was young, Greiner was a whiz at science. Her older brother
had all sorts of neat radio-controlled cars and electronics sets and
Greiner was so jealous that, as she admitted to
Dataquest,
she "sometimes took them." When her family bought one of
the earliest personal computers (PCs), a TRS-80 purchased from Radio
Shack, Greiner claimed it for her own. She spent a good deal of time
tinkering with it and fine-tuning it, and soon she was using it to control
the movements of some of her brother's confiscated toys.

In 1977, when she was only ten years old, Greiner went to see a movie that
would point to her future life's work. That movie was
Star Wars.
While most girls developed crushes on Luke Skywalker or Han Solo, Greiner
was captivated by the three-foot-tall spunky android, R2D2. "He was
not just a machine," she told
Dataquest.
"He had moods, emotions, and dare I say, his own agenda. This was
exciting to me—he was a creature, an artificial creature."
When the ten-year-old found out that R2D2 was actually controlled by a man
inside a plastic-cased costume she was crushed. From that day, Greiner
vowed to create her own R2D2, a real one based on state-of-the-art
technology.

"If we don't take robots to the next level, we'll
have a lot of explaining to do to our grandchildren."

That vow prompted Greiner to attend Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT), one of the finest colleges for science and technology in the world.
While at MIT she dove into the study of robotics and artificial
intelligence (AI). AI is the computer technology that allows robots to
react to situations and gives them some ability to reason. Greiner worked
in MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, which was (and still
is) headed by Rodney Brooks (1954–), the man who would one day be
Greiner's partner at iRobot. Greiner also met Colin Angle at MIT;
Angle would become the third partner in the iRobot venture. The two
actually became acquainted on Greiner's first day on
campus. They became fast friends because they were both devoted to the
science of robots; they were also big snowboarding fans.

Robots Meet the Past: iRobot in Egypt

The iRobot Corporation designs and builds robots that do all kinds of
extraordinary things, from climbing walls to squeezing through narrow
pipes. In the summer of 2002, however, one of the company's
robots visited the past. Earlier in the year iRobot was approached by
the science and exploration magazine
National Geographic
and Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities to build a robot that
would explore two of the shafts, or tunnels, in the Great Pyramid of
Giza. The pyramid, located near Cairo, Egypt, was built around 2650
B.C.E
by the Egyptian pharaoh Khufu (Cheops) to serve as a tomb when he died.

The two shafts in question, a northern one and a southern one, both lead
to the Queen's chamber. In the early 1990s, a German
archaeologist had attempted to explore the southern shaft using a robot,
but was thwarted in his efforts because the shaft was blocked as it
neared the chamber. Shortly after being contacted, iRoboters went to
work. First, they built a test shaft that represented the angle, height,
and width of the pyramid's shaft. Then they quickly designed and
built the tiny Pyramid Rover, which is only approximately 5 inches wide
and 11 inches long. It can expand and contract in height from 4 to 11
inches, which made navigating through the shaft easy since it could grip
the top and bottom for better stability.

The Rover was tied to a controller outside the pyramid and was equipped
with lights, video equipment, and tools specific to archaeology. When it
made its journey through the southern shaft it performed remarkably.
Upon reaching the blocking stone, it used a gauge to figure out the
thickness of the rock; the Rover then drilled a small hole through the
block and inserted a tiny camera using its extending arm. Since the
expedition was televised on the Fox Network, millions of people around
the world were given the first glimpse into the Queen's chamber,
which had been sealed for 4,500 years.

iRobot comes to life

Before Greiner graduated in 1989 with a bachelor's degree in
mechanical engineering she spent some time in Pasadena, California,
interning at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Her job was to help
design robots that would do repairs in space. Her interest was sparked
enough that she developed designs for a space robot that could grasp
objects more easily. The designs became part of her master's
thesis. In 1990, after earning an advanced degree in computer science,
Greiner headed back to California to work at California Cybernetics, a
company that made robots which helped in the manufacture of cars. Less
than a year later she returned to the East Coast to form her own robot
company with Brooks and Angle.

The three roboticists had a very simple plan: to build affordable robots
that could be used in everyday life. A simple plan, but ambitious since
the robotics field was in its early infancy. When Greiner and her
colleagues first started out, she likened it to the early days of
computers in the 1970s. The few robots that existed were very expensive,
costing tens of thousands of dollars, and they were used mostly in
manufacturing, especially in the auto industry to complete such tasks as
spray-painting or welding. Most of the experimentation was being done in
university research labs, and that is where it usually stopped; there was
very little practical application. As Greiner told
Dataquest:
"I saw the work going on in research labs and universities. It was
really great stuff, but it all seemed to die when the funding ran out, or
when the student left. I found this really appalling." She went on
to explain, "Commercial successes will drive the
innovation."

Calling their company IS Robotics, the MIT partners set up shop in
Angle's apartment. Greiner was named president, Angle became the
chief executive officer, and Brooks took on the role of chief technology
officer. They started out building robots for university researchers at a
cost of $3,000 each. Since they only sold about sixty per year, and the
cost of parts was steep, the company barely broke even. The partners
worked eighteen-hour days, writing their own computer codes and soldering
parts, parts that were frequently built in MIT's machine shop.
Eventually they were able to hire a handful of other engineers, but they
also recruited interns from MIT who were paid minimum wage. They were so
dedicated to their vision that they put up all the manufacturing costs
themselves, maxing out their credit cards and racking up over $100,000 in
bank loans.

Military-minded: Ariel and PackBot

The company's first big government contract came in 1993 when it
was hired by the U.S. Department of Defense and the Office of Naval
Research to design an underwater minesweeper. As they do with many of
their creations, company engineers modeled the robot, called the Ariel
Underwater, after a living creature. In this case, the model was the ghost
crab, a burrowing crustacean that lives on Atlantic and Caribbean beaches.
Like the ghost crab, Ariel has six legs and can sway with the tides while
still maintaining a grip on the ocean floor. It is programmed
to detect mines, explosives set in the ground or under the water; it can
also place explosives and scurry away before they blow up.

Boosted by their success, the partners moved into headquarters based in
Somerville, Massachusetts. They also hired more engineers and changed the
company name to iRobot. According to Greiner the name comes from a book of
short stories written in 1950 by noted science fiction author Isaac Asimov
(1920–1992). In addition, the company began to take on some
nonmilitary work. For example, they contracted with the oil-service
company Baker Hughes to design a robot that could travel miles underground
to make repairs in oil-well bores. The bulk of iRobot's business,
however, remained focused on creating products for the military.

I, Robot: The Movie

The iRobot Corporation was named after a series of short stories written
by Isaac Asimov (1920–1992), a popular American science fiction
writer who wrote countless books and who many consider to be one of the
greatest writers in the genre. Asimov is credited with actually coining
the term
robotics.
He also developed what he called the "Three Laws of Robotics
:

A robot may not harm or injure a human being.

A robot must obey the orders that a human being gives to it, unless it
would result in injury.

A robot must protect its own existence as long as it does not
interfere with laws number one or two.

In July of 2004 a movie based on Asimov's stories was released by
20th Century Fox, called
I, Robot.
The film starred Will Smith (1968–) as a detective of the future
investigating the death of a scientist at a company called US Robotics.
Despite the Laws of Robotics, his primary suspect in the killing is a
robot. The robots featured in the movie are called NS-5 models, known as
the "world's first fully automated domestic
assistant." In conjunction with the movie's release, 20th
Century Fox launched an interactive Web site (www.irobotnow.com), which
gave viewers a glimpse into the making of the movie bot; it also allowed
users to virtually build their own NS-5.

Greiner and company turned a corner in 1995 when the Defense Department
commissioned them to make what would become one of their premier products:
a small tank-like robot, known as the PackBot, designed to scope out areas
too dangerous for soldiers. At forty pounds it is portable; it is also
able to climb stairs, travel over even the toughest terrain, and can right
itself, using flippers, if knocked over.
After the World Trade Center in New York City was destroyed in 2001, four
PackBots were sent into nearby buildings to make sure the structures were
sound. In 2002 the robots were first used in combat when they were sent to
Afghanistan. Their mission was to search caves for enemy soldiers and to
sniff out booby traps. At first U.S. soldiers were skeptical. As Greiner
told Elizabeth Durant of
Technology Review,
"The guys were like, 'Robots? We don't need robots.
We were trained how to clear caves.' But when you get to the
cave's mouth, and it's dark inside ... they started calling
for the robots."

Based on feedback from the field, the company was able to tweak the
PackBot's design. In 2003 PackBots were sent to Iraq to search
buildings, vehicles, and airfields for booby traps and mines. The robots
are equipped with a camera that can transmit images back to the base. Some
of the PackBots are even capable of detecting harmful gases. By 2004
estimates, approximately fifty PackBots were being used in Iraq and
Afghanistan and only one of them had been lost in action.

Oh, baby! Company breaks into consumer market

Regardless of her success, Greiner's main goal was still to break
into the consumer market with something affordable and practical. The
company's first foray into the consumer market was definitely more
affordable than the PackBot, which had a price tag of $45,000, but it was
more fun than truly practical. In the late 1990s, iRobot partnered with
the Hasbro toy company to develop a robotic doll. Engineers worked on the
design for almost two years, equipping the doll's skin with
electronic sensors so that it giggled when its feet were tickled and
smiled when it was held. The doll was also programmed to
"learn" to speak.

Called My Real Baby, the toy hit store shelves in 2000. Considering the
doll was quite expensive to produce, at $95.95 it was fairly reasonably
priced. Not reasonable enough for customers, however, since Hasbro sold
only 100,000 units. Greiner still considered the product to be a company
milestone since it paved the way for advancements in artificial
intelligence. Rodney Brooks, who spoke with Joseph Pereira, explained
that, "for the first time our robots had
to interact with countless numbers of people in ordinary homes, not
graduate students [in labs]."

In 2002 iRobot introduced the product that finally put it firmly on the
consumer map, a disc-shaped robotic vacuum cleaner called the Roomba.
Engineers had been working on the design for twelve years. They also put
in countless hours studying the science of floor-cleaning; iRoboters even
spent one night at a Target department store to watch industrial cleaners
at work. The result was a 5-pound, 13-inch-wide appliance that looks very
much like a horseshoe crab. It runs on rechargeable batteries and propels
around a room in wide circles, bouncing lightly off any obstacle it
encounters. When it is finished, it stops, beeps, and turns itself off.

According to the company, Roomba has enjoyed brisk sales. It also received
wide publicity on television, radio, and in countless magazines. Oprah
Winfrey (1954–) named it "one of her favorite
things," and the Roomba was awarded the seal of approval from
Good Housekeeping,
a magazine that has long served consumers. In addition, iRobot and Roomba
received hearty approval within the robotics industry. As Craig Jennings,
president of the Robotic Industries Association, told Elizabeth Durant,
"Nobody else has a product that has had the success of Roomba. I
think [iRobot] hit a home run."

Greiner predictions

By 2004 the tiny company that was started in a scientist's
apartment employed over 120 people, and was based in Burlington,
Massachusetts, with branch offices in Milford, New Hampshire, and San Luis
Obispo, California. It had contracts in multiple markets, including
academic, industrial, military, and consumer, which made it the largest,
privately owned robotics company in the world. The corporation's
mission, however, remained roughly the same. As stated on the iRobot Web
site, the partners pledge "to build really cool stuff; to make
money; to have fun; and to change the world."

Because of the company's growth and success, its founders,
especially Greiner, began to receive quite a bit of recognition. In 2002
Greiner was named an Innovator for the Next Century by MIT's
Technology Review
; in 2003, she made
Fortune
magazine's list of the Top 10 Innovators Under 40 in the United
States. According to Greiner,
however, iRobot was just beginning to take off. "There's so
much room for innovation and new ideas," she commented to Kristin
Weir of
Current Science.

Greiner's predictions for the future of robotics are great. She
told Deepa Kandasamy of
Dataquest
that according to U.S. military officials within fifteen years,
"one-third of all military vehicles will be unmanned." She
also believes that given the advancements in AI technology and the drop in
costs for robot components, such as computer chips, consumer products will
become even more affordable. "Within five years robots will be
cleaning floors and acting as remote eyes and ears," Greiner
enthused to Kandasamy, "Within fifteen years, they will act as true
personal assistants and friends." When asked about her personal
vision, Greiner, whose corporate office is strewn with toy robots, replied
that she sees "our robots taking on all dangerous jobs. A robot in
every office building. A robot in every home that has a computer. We will
change the world with this technology."

For More Information

Periodicals

Durant, Elizabeth. "Robot-Triumvirate: A Robotic Vacuum Cleaner Is
Putting iRobot and Its Three Founders on the Map."
Technology Review
(October 2003).